


The Taste of Loneliness

by PandoraTheExplorer



Series: Month of Drabbles Challenge 2018 [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Mentions of Character Death, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-12 22:36:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PandoraTheExplorer/pseuds/PandoraTheExplorer
Summary: Jade Harley has always been alone. When she is finally with her friends, she has trouble adjusting.(I wrote this for my Month of Drabbles Challenge for 2018)





	The Taste of Loneliness

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! This was the first story I wrote in March 2018 for the Month of Drabbles Challenge that you can find info for on my tumblr at @pandoratheprocrastinator. There were some stories I didn't really like as much as the others so I won't post them here but I'll probably post most of them. I'm planning to do the challenge for 2019, too. Anyway here's story number one for 2018:

Jade Harley had tasted loneliness.

~

When she was six, she swam to a tiny islet near the main island she lived on and found the corpse of her grandfather sitting across from a blue doll. The body was heavy to carry, but she eventually dragged it back to her house and stuffed it-just like Grandpa would have wanted.

At first Jade thought the blue doll was responsible for his death, but one day when she were ten, it dawned on her that he probably killed himself. The thought upset her. Why would Grandpa commit suicide? Did he want to be gone from her that badly? If not, then why would he leave her?

Bec was there, and Bec helped. And it wasn’t like Jade couldn’t play with some of the carapaces on Prospit whenever she slept. But even with the occasional video chat with John, Rose, or Dave, the memory of how a human looked was beginning to grow fuzzy at the back of Jade’s mind.

~

Jade Harley had tasted loneliness.

~

She was wandering on Skaia, afraid of death and longing for it. Davesprite had approached her, and they’d talked. When meteors fell from the sky straight towards them, Jade looked at Davesprite in resignation. Davesprite took her hand, and Jade closed her eyes, glad that at least she wasn’t going to die alone.

Then she was a god. She held out her hand and willed the meteor to shrink and it did. She shrank Skaia and LoWaS and LoRaR and LoHaC and LoFaF and now she had five whole planets of friends and her brother with her. After John threw a bucket through her body to Dave and Rose’s meteor, Jade had cried and wrapped John in a bear hug. Finally. Finally she wasn’t alone.

~

Jade Harley had tasted lonliness.

~

John was dead. Davesprite was dead. The entirety of LoWaS laid in bits and pieces on her desk, never to be brought back again. Nanasprite was still here, and so were all the carapaces and consorts on the other planets. Jade couldn’t bring herself to care, though. John, her brother, one of her best friends, was gone. Davesprite, who had tried so hard to cheer her up on Skaia, who she was building up the courage to ask out on a date, was gone. Sometimes, she wished that she had gone with John and Davesprite to LoWaS that day and had been blown up with them. Maybe then there wouldn’t be this horrible aching feeling at the bottom of her heart.

Jade had lost track of how long it’s been since she’d got up from her bed. She was hungry and thirsty, but it wasn’t like she could die from either of those things. Nanasprite told her that John will be back. That Jade could see him again when she saw Rose and Dave again. But what did that matter? The John she knew was gone, and he was never coming back. Why did everyone she loved leave her like this? Was she just a beacon of death, bringing the same horrible fate to all her friends and family?

Jade tried so many times to join John and Davesprite in the dream bubbles. She tried shrinking her heart until her arteries tore to pieces. She jumped from ladders wearing rope around her neck. Knives and tall buildings and John’s dad’s expired medicine could never do the trick-by themselves or in any combination. It seemed that the rules of Suburb counted suicide as neither a heroic death nor a just one. Jade resigned herself to the uncomfortable familiarity of her own bed, absentmindedly spinning her friends’ planets around in her palm like marbles and resisting the urge to crush one of them like John’s planet was crushed.

~

On the victory platform, she wasn’t alone anymore.

~

John had grown at least a foot and a half since she’d last seen him-he was almost as tall as her now. Dave and Rose were three shades darker from the Green Sun and interacted with each other with an air of familiarity Jade wished she could have had with John. Her grandpa-Jake English, his name was now-greeted her awkwardly, and Jade wondered if the Jade Harley she was now was similar to the Jade English Jake had known. Probably not.

~

Jade Harley had tasted loneliness

~

On the new Earth Jade and her friends had created, Jade felt even more alone. Dave and Rose, as well as the trolls they’d lived on the meteor with, were inseparable. John had awkwardly approached her, but Jade knew that when he looked at her, he was thinking of the dead sister he’d left behind in his own timeline. When she didn’t understand jokes that John made or references to events that happened in a timeline where John’s planet had not exploded, her brother’s expression grew sad and Jade would always quickly excuse herself.

She didn’t know what she was doing in the troll kingdom. Everyone was choosing the kingdom they wanted to live in and Jade just agreed to live with the trolls because Dave was the first one to ask her where she wanted to go. Jade didn’t even know the trolls that well. Why did she live here?

It was so easy to fall back to her old routine-wake up, lay in bed for a few more hours, get a snack, go to the bathroom, and lay on the couch listening to music until she fell asleep again. Days turned into weeks, and eventually Jade lost track of how long it’s been.

~

One day Dave knocked on her door and grabbed her wrist when she answered and flew the both of them to John’s house, where Rose and a very confused John were waiting. John had been having trouble getting out too, Rose explained, and she and Dave have decided that the four of them were going to hang out like actual friends do.

It was unusual at first, having three more people than usual by her side, chatting about things of varying importance and requiring more energy from her than she thought she had. After a while, though, Jade found that she loved it. She loved how the way her friends spoke in real life resembled the way they worded their messages to her all those years ago. She loved that she would see the stray tufts of John’s hair, the small curve of Rose’s smile, and the glint of Dave’s sunglasses in detail instead of through the grainy filter of a webcam.

By nine o’clock, Jade decided that she never wanted to go back to the deafening emptiness of her own house again. John offered for all of them to stay over, and everyone readily agreed. Jade wondered-if she lived with John for a long enough time, would that make up for all those missing years spent alone on that lonely golden ship?

It was strange, how you could spend years getting to know someone over a computer and still have so many new things to find out about them after spending some time with them in person. Jade never could have guessed how loudly John snored, or how tightly Dave would cling to her arm in his sleep, or that Rose was such a blanket hog. Jade smiled and drifted off to sleep, surrounded by her best friends in the world.

~

Jade Harley had tasted loneliness, but for the first time, she didn’t have to anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Jade deserved better.  
> Please comment!


End file.
